Sports

*Update: Scottie Pippen is now onboard and will be apart of the original Dream Team in the game.

The Lakers’ Kobe Bryant sparked a minor uproar this offseason when he said the current Olympic Team could beat the fabled Dream Team from 1992. That’s a tough supposition because it’s hypothetical. We can never know if this current group of NBA stars could beat the legends of yesteryear. You can argue all you want about it or you can play the matchup.

NBA 2K13 will feature both teams. How would Kobe match up against Michael? Could Karl Malone take on Lebron? When it comes to recent college players, I’d take Anthony Davis over Christian Laettner any day. To be honest, I never thought this would happen given the hurdles with getting approval by USA Basketball and other stars like Charles Barkley who was noticeably absent in last year’s edition.

The only weird thing is that it looks like Scottie Pippen isn’t on the roster, but I could live with that. Oct. 2 can’t get here soon enough.

Pitchers and catchers are reporting right now and that means baseball season is around the corner. What better way to mark the occasion than to take a look at the upcoming baseball title MLB 2K12. I had chance to check out the latest iteration a few days ago and liked the improvements and changes to the series. I also got some insight into the creative process.

I looked over their list of titles, and one caught my interest — Winter Stars.This isn’t a game about killing the undead nor is it as big and all-consuming as Techland’s island adventure. It’s a Kinect title developed by 49Games and anything that uses the Microsoft’s sensor intrigues me.

But from the outset, the game looks fairly conventional. There are 11 winter sports to play through: bobsledding, the biathlon, figure skating, downhill skiing, a snowboard cross, curling, speed skating, ski jumping, para skiing, ski-doo and ski alpine freeride. Yeah, that’s a lot of ski-type activities.

Despite its meteoric rise, mixed martial arts hasn’t arrived yet as a sport. Sure, it’s popular but it still lags behind the four major sports, including hockey. Part of the reason is that the mainstream doesn’t understand its nuances.

From an outsiders perspective, MMA is all about pummeling some guy’s face while he’s on the ground, but as I’ve learned recently with UFC Undisputed 3, there’s more to the sport than that. Sometimes the guy on his back has an advantage, and exploiting a mistake can turn a bad position into dominating one.

All one has to do is flick the right stick on the new amateur controls of UFC 3. It’s one of the new features designed to expand the sport and franchise’s audience. I played the game at a recent preview event in San Francisco and talked with producer Neven Dravinski and designer Wes Bunn.

With the thick of tennis season approaching this summer, Sega and 2K Sports’ latest installments of their respective series —Virtua Tennis 4 and Top Spin 4 — take center court. Like all sports games, which title you’ll ultimately gravitate toward will depend on how much realism you want to have in your gaming experience.

If you’re looking for nuance and finesse, Top Spin4 is the way to go. Virtua Tennis 4’s roots are firmly in its quarter-crunching past. Three buttons control the kind of shots you make — slices, top spin and lob shots. How powerful these shots are depends on your position. Trying to hit a ball off-balance results in a weak return. You can control where your return will land by holding the left analog stick in the desired direction.

The controls are easy enough to pick up and plenty forgiving, but those craving a little more control to pull off riskier shots will be left wanting, especially when it feels like the computer-controlled opponent seems able to return everything you throw at it.

Editor’s note: We’re days away from opening day, and just in nick of time, our very own Jeremy Owens decided to review MLB 2K11. Here’s what he thought.

By Jeremy Owens
Guest reviewer

Baseball is a simple game. Throw the ball, hit the ball, catch the ball.
Could somebody get that message to the designers of MLB 2K11?

Once again, the makers of the excellent NBA 2K series have failed to make an equivalently enjoyable baseball game, mostly because it tries to get too fancy with the controls. The hitting interface is especially difficult. It is controlled with both analog sticks — the player has to decide with the left analog stick if he wants to pull the ball, go the other way, attempt to hit the ball in the air or put it on the ground, then use the right stick to actually swing the bat. For even more confusion, a power swing involves an opposite motion, pushing the right analog stick down before pushing it up to swing; after playing several games, I hit no home runs and still couldn’t figure out if I was supposed to use the left analog stick and/or pull back on the right analog stick for power as the pitcher was winding up or just before I swung.

All these motions and decisions must be made in little more than a second or two, along with deciding the timing of your swing based on the pitch’s speed. “Difficult” would be a very nice way to describe the process of learning how to hit; “ridiculously annoying and impossible” would be more blunt. The only good part about all of this is that the hitter’s swing does change based on your actions, so when you completely fail (which will happen a lot), you can use the Swing Analyzer to get a good laugh at Pablo Sandoval swinging like a confused fifth-grader.

I’m not a Michael Jordan fan. I don’t like His Airness but I respect him. That’s the best you can get from a Lakers fan who had his heart ripped out from him in the 1991 NBA Finals. You can hate the man but still admire his game. That’s part of Michael Jordan’s appeal. That’s why he’s one of the athletes who transcends his sport. As a loyalists for the other team, you wanted him to have a 1-for-21 night, but at the same time as a basketball fan, you wanted him to do something spectacular on the one shot he makes.

So I came into the NBA 2K11 preview with some curiosity about how Visual Concepts would treat the best player of his generation. Would they do anything more beyond the Jordan Challenge? The answer is yes. They’re doing a lot more. In fact, here are fours reasons why having Michael Jordan will make this the best NBA 2K11 in years.

Trey Smith looks like a basketball player. The creative director of the upcoming NBA Jam is tall and lanky guy. He towers above me, but then again, I’m really short.

At the EA Summer Showcase, he explained the history of the project. Originally, it was never intended to be NBA Jam. In the beginning, the working title was Bounce, a two-on-two basketball game. But the similarities between both were so obvious, Smith wondered if they could just ask for the rights.

“We were going to be compared to Jam so why don’t we get the license,” he said. That led to some detective work as lawyers tracked down it down from the now-defunct Midway to Acclaim, which closed down in 2004. After some searching, they discovered that the license had reverted to the NBA, and the Association was happy to let them borrow it.More on NBA Jam on the jump

If you were up early this morning and turned on ESPN 2, you were probably checking out the World Cup 2010 draw. I was moderately excited and checked it out while flipping channels, but a number of folks in the newsroom were in full-blown cheering mode. The United States ended up with England and we landed in Group C, which is apparently a good thing.

My enthusiastic comrades remind me that the soccer’s popularity in the United States has been steadily growing, and nothing proves this more than the success of FIFA 10. Here are some stats EA revealed this week with my comments in bold:

* EA SPORTS FIFA Soccer sales have grown 189 percent since the
2002 FIFA World Cup. I can see this happening. It’s better than sales going down.

* North America is the No. 2 market for the EA SPORTS FIFA
Soccer franchise, second only to the U.K. and surpassing other
soccer-crazed countries such as Spain and Germany. I’m very surprised at this. Then again, we do have a ton of people in this country.

* An average of 741,900 games of EA SPORTS FIFA Soccer 10 are
played each day in the U.S. That’s 11,592 FIFA World Cups played per
day. Eh

* FIFA Soccer 10 sold more 4.5 million units in its first 5
weeks at retail, making it the biggest sports videogame launch in
history. Not a surprise. Soccer is a global game.

* FIFA Soccer is the fourth largest EA SPORTS videogame
franchise in North America (behind Madden, Tiger Woods and NCAA
Football). I wonder what this says about NBA Live and the NHL game.

It’s safe to say that 2K Sports had a down year when it came to hockey. Kush Games, the team that had been making the NHL 2K series, shut down, leaving the franchise in dire straits. There was about five months before the game was shipped to shelves and the project had shifted to Visual Concepts.

With such a tight schedule, it’s understandable that the developer of the excellent NBA 2K series couldn’t put out the best product it could. Time constraints wouldn’t allow it. But the best thing about sports games is that a new one is released every year, and with enough development leeway, it looks like NHL 2K10 will live up to the quality gamers expect from the studio.

This time around, Visual Concepts delivers an upgraded graphical look, broader online support and return to the sim roots of the franchise. I’m not a huge hockey fan, but even I could see the improvements with the game.